First responders are organizations and personnel that provide law enforcement, safety and protection services to the public. The first responders include law enforcement officers like police, sheriff, highway patrol, detectives, special law enforcement, FBI, DEA, military personnel, border patrol, and others. First responders also include fire and safety personnel, for example, firefighters, emergency medical services personnel, Red Cross personnel, and other emergency workers.
The communications systems and associated command and control capabilities used by first responders in responding to an incident or another emergency are typically limited to agency-unique communication frequencies and procedures. As a result, the various different groups of personnel that respond to emergency incidents (police and firefighters, for example) are unable to communicate with each other. When different groups of first responders need to communicate with each other at an incident scene they typically use “runners” to relay information, or each group just performs their respective tasks and operates without any type of unified communication or operation. In some cases, inter-agency communications occur by relaying information through the respective dispatch centers. However, this is a very slow and inefficient way of communicating. The lack of inter-operable communications between on-scene agencies can result in ineffective coordination, often with tragic results. FIG. 15 shows an incident scene 1500 without interoperable communications and incident site, intelligence, under the prior art.
Further to the very limited communications capability, adequate situational awareness is also lacking among the first responder personnel and among various first responder teams because there are no mechanisms available to inform the incident commander except for intermittent radio transmissions. More important is that there is no way to know the location of the various first responders at the incident scene except for verbal location information coming from constant monitoring of voice communications. However, the lack of voice communications among the different groups of first responders means that there is no real location information available and the only situational awareness even available is limited information generated by members of the same agency.
Using firefighters as an example, the most critical priority in emergency fire and disaster response situations is the tracking, location, and rescue of firefighters, especially in burning structures. The current strategy uses two-way handheld radios by which firefighters provide their location verbally; however, some fire departments are not even equipped with the handheld radios. Additionally, neither the interior of a burning structure nor firefighting operations and equipment (e.g. large gloves) are conducive to using a handheld radio or cellular telephone.
Integral to the lack of situational awareness at an incident site is the lack of an accurate system for maintaining personnel accountability of the first responders at an incident site. The typical methods used to maintain accountability of first response personnel are manual methods. In each of these manual methods, the usual procedure is to use some physical means of identifying whether a responder is present at the incident scene, and in some cases to identify where the responder is assigned during the emergency. Because these methods are manual, they do not provide a way to accurately account for all first responder personnel at an incident site, nor do they provide ways to dynamically track the actual location or movement of first responder personnel around the incident site as the emergency unfolds. Consequently, the incident command and control personnel (also referred to as Incident Command and the Safety Officer) do not have detailed information on the location of the first responders and can lose accountability of first responders. As an example, the lack of intelligence at incident sites has resulted in the loss of numerous firefighter personnel (over 100 per year in every day fires) as well as the injury of many others (many hundreds) in fires because the incident commander was unaware of the dangerous circumstances or lost accountability of individual firefighters.
The lack of adequate intelligence information and inter-agency communications at incident sites results in incident commanders and first responder personnel that lack the detailed information and situational awareness of the incident scene to effectively respond to an emergency. The cascading effect typically results in slower response times to emergencies, less-than-optimal deployment of fire department resources and a much higher level of risk for the first responders and incident victims. Consequently, there is a need among first responders to have accountability of and interoperable communications among all responders at an incident site as well as a high level of situational awareness for the first responders in order to provide greater safety and more efficiency in the use of the resources at the incident scene.
In the drawings, the same reference numbers identify identical or substantially similar elements or acts.